


red petals

by mythbusterposey



Category: Star Trek
Genre: Gen, author is butthurt about deadshirts, author is in the military and projected her angst upon this, overly excessive killing of redshirts, redshirt POV
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-01
Updated: 2014-08-01
Packaged: 2018-02-11 07:42:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 575
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2059710
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mythbusterposey/pseuds/mythbusterposey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>warp is different from the outside.</p>
            </blockquote>





	red petals

When I was young, I would look to the skies and not see stars, but starships. I made wishes on ships. It sounds stupid and insignificant but I guess my insignificance is solidified in the red jumper I wear. When I told mom I was getting put on the Enterprise, she was so happy. Well. I think she was happy. She was crying, at least.

My mother was a botanist, and she ran a flower shop in the city, one of the last. The soil wasn't rich enough to sustain strong plant life, so the red roses that would bloom outside of our house would shine in the sun for about ninety seconds every spring before the petals blew into the wind. My father was a biologist, and for my mother's birthday, he presented her with a rose that would bloom and shed the way hers did, it'd just do it every day.

 

Well, the timing was a little off on his part, so they'd only bloom when the stars were out. Starships. Whatever. It was nighttime, which is probably why the stupid plant died after a month.

 

When I told them I was enlisting in the Star Fleet Engineering Corps, my father's eyes got hard and my mother wept. I didn't understand. I went on to the Academy to hear stories of families growing stronger as the tradition of joining Star Fleet colored their family's histories. I was just met with barely-masked disappointment and tears.

 

So I made myself work as hard as I could, graduated near the top of my class, got me orders to the Enterprise. Told myself my parents were as proud as the cadet next to me. In my quarters, I kept a picture of one of those roses, just beginning to shed.

 

I worked in the engineering bay three positions under Montgomery Scott. I told myself not to see the bigger picture, to be a good little working mouse and to get the job done and maybe I won't be another "expendable red shirt" joke.

 

We flew to Kronos when the reactor core crapped out on us. Scott wasn't there, so we were suddenly under the command of a piped up barely-legal Russian kid. A lot of the people I worked with were disgruntled at being told what to do by a teenager, but I figure: it's not my job to make decisions, it's my job to make sure my part of this beautiful ship is working. We worked around the clock to get the core back online and running, and I wasn't the first to notice there was something wrong with it. Meaning, it had been tampered with. It must have happened with all of the modifications Mr. Scott had put in while we were in port.

 

I didn't know why, but we were trying to escape suddenly. The core was barely held together, hanging by threads.

 

Then the blast hit engineering, and we were all sucked out.

 

Space is extremely quiet. It's not the unsettling quiet of your parents trying not to let you know that they're talking about you in the next room. It's just...peace. Surrounded by blue light from the warp stream and my coworkers, I was reminded of springtime, and I stayed calm for ninety seconds as I saw red petals being tossed in the wind.

 

And I smiled, knowing that there were always more petals to bloom when the stars came out.

**Author's Note:**

> SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY


End file.
